Why Chinese Students Leave

Ecuador SAP Foundation

Why Chinese Students Leave

In China, the road from secondary to post-secondary education involves the dreaded hurdle of strenuous national university entrance examinations. Unlike U.S. institutions that value candidates who present themselves as unique, their Chinese counterparts want students who excel on entrance exams that require years of rote learning and a strong grasp of math and science.

China's young netizen community is abuzz with talk about the many differences between China's education system and those of Western countries. Some have even criticized the leading Chinese institution, Peking University, in contrast with elite U.S. universities such as Yale.

Zhao Jun, a municipal education official who is hoping to send his son abroad, told the Atlantic that Chinese courses are "too rigid, the method of teaching is too mechanical, and the standard for measuring talent is too one-dimensional." 

According to the Industrial Bank and Hurun Report white paper, wealthy Chinese parents value "all-around development" and "quality-oriented education" for their children. But even outside the upper class, there is now widespread debate about the stature of China's state education and whether it needs to be reformed.

Party Bosses' Children

Even China's ruling elite isn't immune to the attraction of sending its children overseas.

Western media have reported that Xi Mingze, the daughter of Xi Jinping, who is widely expected to become the new president of China and chairman of its Communist Party, is studying at Harvard University under an assumed name. (The university hasn't confirmed to the International Business Times that she indeed studies there.)

Walking around campus, though, she could have run into the son of Bo Xilai, the recently dismissed party boss in Chongqing, who attends the same institution.

Coming To America

The tradition of Chinese coming to America for education before making their mark back home has a long history. The first Chinese student to graduate from a U.S. university, industrialist and political reformer Yung Wing, received a degree from Yale in 1854 and later naturalized to become a U.S. citizen.

However, most wind up staying for the long term. Last year, Fujian's Overseas Chinese (Huaqiao) University estimated that only 497,400 of the 1.62 million students that arrived in the United States between 1978 and 2009 returned to the land of their birth. That means almost 70 percent of the Chinese students who came to the U.S. during that period made it their new home.

Sending an only child thousands of miles away, possibly for the rest of his or her life, is emotionally difficult. Still, the high value placed on U.S. schools, coupled with the attraction of studying English, the international language of business, provide compelling reasons for Chinese families hoping to build a strong future for their sons and daughters.